According to Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, the record turnout in the 2020 election, as well as the Democratic presidential victory, were the direct results of on-the-ground organizing done by a wide array of social justice groups throughout the country. (The book is available from the publisher, OR Books.)
“The strategies implemented were based on the conviction that sufficient investment of time and resources—together with culturally savvy messaging—could tap into the potential for low-propensity voters to determine election outcomes,” write Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, and Maria Poblet, the editors of the twenty-two essay collection. (The book’s title comes from Frederick Douglass’s quote, “power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will.”)
“We learned that multiracial organizing against authoritarian forces is possible even in one of the most segregated states.”
Nonetheless, they noticed something disheartening in the aftermath of the election. Even though a host of victories had been achieved, elation was relatively short-lived. “We sensed a substantial amount of demoralization and pessimism in parts of the social justice world,” editor Elbaum tells The Progressive, “and wanted the book to be a reminder of what folks had accomplished and bring positive energy and hope to the left and progressive worlds.”
Power Concedes Nothing does this and more. The book is an upbeat manual for grassroots organizing and includes a detailed explication of many everyday activist tasks, from door-knocking and “deep canvassing,” to voter registration drives, to rallying and generating buzz about a particular race.
Not surprisingly, several essays cover Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Invited to the discussion are organizations that opted against supporting the Democratic Party after Sanders ended his most recent presidential bid, as well as those that gave the Biden-Harris ticket their all.
What’s more, many of the essays offer insight into the strategies used to invigorate previously unengaged people living in long-neglected Black, Brown, and Asian working class neighborhoods, whether rural, urban, or suburban, and zeroes in on local, statewide, and national elections. The goal: to elucidate the arguments that successfully got folks mobilized.
In “The Battle for Democracy in Michigan,” for example, Art Reyes III and Eli Day of We the People, a Sanders-affiliated grassroots group founded in 2017, proudly tout their work to “out-organize and out-maneuver the far right.” They admit that nothing came easily—but it did come.
“We learned that multiracial organizing against authoritarian forces is possible even in one of the most segregated states—but only if we are intentional about campaign structure, deliberate about state strategy, explicit about race, diligent about preparing more than the right, and clear that we must build trust early before the stakes are high,” they write.
Creative Commons
"Power Concedes Nothing"
The group, they continue, spent three years building relationships throughout the state, hearing the dreams of diverse community members and training organizers. Racial injustice—from the vicious racism seen in Flint’s water crisis to suppression of Black voters in Detroit—took center stage as We the People not only worked to get out the vote on Election Day but created infrastructure to hold their elected officials accountable.
Similar work to build strong community-based and community-led organizations to buttress electoral work also came to fruition in Georgia. There, a broad-based coalition between Black Voters Matter, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and the New Georgia Project laid the groundwork and did the dogged day-to-day work needed to elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and flip control of the U.S. Senate.
And even in states like Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor in 2021, activists were able to successfully push a measure to restore voting rights to 40,000 formerly incarcerated state residents, signed into law by the state’s previous governor before he left office. In Florida, voters were able to win a $15 minimum wage; send Michelle Raynor, a queer, Black progressive, to the statehouse; and elect Daniela Levine Cava, a Jewish nonprofit leader, as mayor of Miami-Dade County in 2020.
Power Concedes Nothing not only reminds readers of these and other wins, but it also emphasizes how much fun organizing can be—even during a pandemic. But this hefty dose of inspiration is tempered by the fact that 57 percent of white women supported Trump in 2020, something the book hardly mentions. This leaves a gaping hole as it appears to sidestep the role of gender in future electoral work.
In fact, many multiracial women’s groups are actively pushing back against rightwing efforts to control the teaching of history; ban trans athletes from school sports teams; limit discussion of gender, gender identity, and sexuality in public schools; and restrict access to books that address these themes in both school and public libraries. They’re also establishing mutual aid networks should Roe v. Wade be eviscerated and are working hard to elect trans-inclusive intersectional feminists to public office.
This is not the book’s only flaw.
While it is essential to analyze the 2020 and 2021 elections, Power Concedes Nothing further misses the mark by not addressing the rightwing backlash that was triggered by the Biden-Harris victory. Indeed, by giving short shrift to this rightwing resurgence, the book bungles a chance to have in-the-moment relevance.
Still, taken as a whole, Power Concedes Nothing is an important, wise, and accessible book and a positive assessment of the role that electoral work can play in social change movements. It’s also a reminder that we need to make our agenda known and use every possible avenue, including voting, to create the world in which we wish to live.